We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

For Perrier, the series is deeply personal: “Growing up, my hair was often styled in cornrows or wrapped in black cotton thread… over time I moved through braids, wigs, a shaved head and eventually locks”.

These images reflect the cultural and personal significance of hair and hairstyles as symbols of pride and resistance.

To make the work, she constructed a room in her family home in Italy based on the dimensions of her former London flat. Using photography and film, she stages and re-enters this space to explore isolation, the loss of touch and the structures we build around ourselves.

While rooted in personal experience, the work speaks to a shared condition of separation and uncertainty.

Pollard’s practice engages with representation, history and identity. Through the process of hand-tinting, she reworks the image, drawing attention to the black figures within it and shifting the narrative of the original photograph.

The figures emerge as individuals with agency, foregrounding lives that were marginalised within colonial image-making and revealing the layered histories embedded in the image.

Drawing on influences from classical mythology, astronomy and African symbolism, Viktor works across mediums to create richly layered images. The figure’s commanding presence resists fixed interpretation, challenging historical representations of black bodies. The work reclaims blackness as a site of power and value, responding to colonial narratives and the myth of Africa as the ‘dark continent’.

Highlighting the 1956 Women’s March on Pretoria – a pivotal moment in South Africa’s history – the work honours collective acts of defiance against laws that restricted the movement and rights of black women.

Photographed at the Old Fort Prison complex in Johannesburg, where many protesters and political prisoners were detained under apartheid, the image connects histories of resistance with the present.

Tirvengadum has few images of her family prior to the 1960s. To reconstruct her family album, she trained an AI model on the photographs that do exist from her personal archive and wider extended family network, prompting generative AI to visualise her family’s lost history.

Moments of togetherness are imagined: birthdays, studio portraits, family gatherings. These constructed images complicate the boundaries of truth, questioning what has been lost, hidden or never existed.

In 2016, Saye participated in a tintype workshop during the exhibition Black Chronicles: Missing Chapter, producing a series of self-portraits later gifted to her mother. Although the originals were lost in the fire, digitised images form the basis of this work.

Known for examining histories of violence and power, Sasha Huber used her signature staple gun method to embed hundreds of staples into burnt wood – an act of remembrance for the 72 lives lost in the fire. As in many of Huber’s works, the ‘shooting’ became a stitching of wounds, making visible lost narratives and resisting erasure.

Created in 1991, Walker’s photographs emerged at a moment of profound social and cultural transformation in Britain, as questions of race, identity, representation and belonging became increasingly central.

Black Beauty engages with the shifting and often exclusionary standards of beauty. Through this series, Walker offers visions from a space of her own making: one that values and welcomes her Blackness.

Disrupting the idea of landscape as a ‘neutral’ space, she assembles fragments of urban and rural imagery drawn from tourist guides, magazines and advertising. Drawing on the visual languages of Islamic art and Japanese geometry, her works reconstruct familiar views into carefully patterned compositions.

In doing so, Nadeem invites us to consider what is visible, what is marginalised and what has been deliberately removed.

The series makes use of an archive of magic lantern slides from the early 1900s. Chi Yin's interventions enable a re-imaginging of history and photographic time travel, through which the artist creates a fantastical time-space visual repertoire.”

In A Single’s Waltz in Time, Weems stages herself dancing through the ‘White Ballroom’ of Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana. Built in 1859 by enslaved labourers, the site stands as a reminder of the wealth and violence that underpin its grandeur.

Through gesture and movement, Weems reclaims the space, unsettling its history and asserting presence within it.

The artist embraces the unease of being photographed – where to look, how to position the body – and allows these moments of uncertainty to shape her self-portraits. The poetic black-and-white images layer light and fragmentation to draw attention to subtle shifts in body language, inviting us to consider what it means to be truly vulnerable.

De Miranda uses the island as a metaphor for isolation, refuge and possibility – a space for collective imagining and new forms of freedom. The work invites us to consider our relationship to the past, the lands we inhabit and to imagine more regenerative futures.

Rooted in fragmented memory and intergenerational silence, Hua’s work reflects on how personal histories are shaped by absence and gaps in communication. Through reconstruction and distortion, the image becomes a space where the past is continually reinterpreted in the present.

Gregory described Autoportrait as “my response to the invisibility, beyond the exotic, of black women in British fashion and beauty images”. Referencing the fantasy and glamour of the catwalk, the work reflects a world from which black women had been largely excluded.
Autoportrait was Autograph’s first artist commission, marking the organisation’s founding in 1988.

Using analogue film and long exposures, Amouzou inscribes her presence into the spaces she inhabits. Her blurred, ghost-like form appears against the worn interior of an attic, evoking absence, waiting and uncertainty. Repeated motifs such as suitcases suggest the instability of life in transit.

In Basu’s words, “the work is an act of embodied activism – a way of listening to the body, the earth and each other”.’

Working with photography, Basu amplifies women’s voices across the majority world. Drawing on magical realism, ecofeminism and dystopian science fiction, she interweaves the real and the imagined to create images shaped by memory and lived experience.

Built through the labour of enslaved people, these grand interiors reflect the histories of violence and exploitation that underpin their opulence.

The work draws on the concept of 'Nepantla', an ancient term from the Náhuatl language, often cited in Chicano and Latino anthropology. The artist explains: "Nepantla refers to a state of in-betweenness… a spatial concept of ‘being in-the-middle of it’, like in the eye of the storm. And this work emerges from an absence or a recognition of earthlessness in me."